Table of Contents

3.
Summing-Up Speech On The Report Of The C.C. Of The R.C.P.(B.),
March 9
4. Preliminary Draft Resolution On Improving The Condition Of Workers And
Needy Peasants.
5. Speech On The Trade Unions, March 14 .

8. Preliminary Draft Resolution Of The Tenth Con-Gress Of
The R.C.P. On Party Unity
9. Preliminary Draft Resolution Of The Tenth Con-Gress Of The R.C.P. On
The Syndicalist And Anarchist Deviation In Our Party
10. Report On Party Unity And The Anarcho-Syndicalist Deviation, March
16
11. Summing-Up Speech On Party Unity And The Anarcho-Syndicalist
Deviation, March 16
12. Remarks On Ryazanov’s Amendment To The Resolution On Party
Unity, March 16
13. Speech On The Fuel Question, March 16
14. Proposal On The Fuel Question, March 16
15. Speech In Closing The Congress, March 16

Endnotes

[1] The
Tenth Party Congress was held in Moscow on March 8-16, 1921. It was
attended by 694 delegates with voice and vote and 296 with voice only.
They represented 732,521 Party members. The items on the agenda were: 1)
Report of the Central Committee 2) Report of the Control Commission; 3)
The trade unions’ economic role; 4) The Socialist Republic in a
capitalist encirclement foreign trade, concessions, etc.; 5) Food supply,
surplus-food appropriation, tax in kind and fuel crisis, 6) Problems of
Party organisation; 7) The Party’s current tasks in the
nationalities question; 8) Reorganisation of the army and the militia
question; 9) The Chief Administration for Political Education and the
Party’s propaganda and agitation work; 10) Report of the
R.C.P.’s representative in the Comintern, and its current tasks; 11)
Report of the R.C.P.’s representatives in the International Trade
Union Council; 12) Elections to the Central Committee, the Control
Commission and the Auditing Commission. The Congress resolutions dealt
with the key political and economic problems.

Lenin lead much of the work of the Congress: he
delivered the opening and closing speeches and gave reports on the
political activity of the C.C., the substitution of a tax in kind for the
surplus appropriation system, the Party’s unity and the
anarcho-syndicalist deviation, the trade unions and the fuel crisis. He
drafted the main resolutions. He gave a theoretical and political
substantiation of the necessity of transition from War Communism to the
New Economic Policy (NEP). The Congress adopted historic decisions on the
substitution of a tax in kind for the surplus appropriation system, and
the transition to NEP, which was designed to draw millions of peasants
into the organization of the planned socialist economy.

The Congress paid special attention to the
Party’s unity. Lenin exposed and sharply criticised the anti-Marxist
views of the opposition groups. The resolution “On Party
Unity” adopted on Lenin’s motion ordered the immediate
dissolution of all factions and groups which tended to weaken the
Party’s unity. The Congress authorised the Central Committee to
apply, as an extreme measure, expulsion from the Party to C.C. members who
engaged in factional activity.

The Congress also adopted Lenin’s draft
resolution “On the Syndicalist and Anarchist Deviation in our
Party”, which exposed the views of the Workers’ Opposition as
an expression of petty-bourgeois, anarchist vacillations. The propaganda
of anarcho-syndicalist ideas was found to be incompatible with membership
in the Party. With the country engaged in peaceful socialist construction,
the Congress came down in favour of broader democracy within the Party.

The Congress summed up the discussion on the trade
unions’ role in economic development, condemned the ideas of the ,
the Workers’ Opposition, the Democratic Centralism group and other
trends, and approved Lenin’s platform by an overwhelming majority,
terming the trade unions as a school of communism, and suggesting measures
to develop trade union democracy.

A commission headed by Lenin worked out the
Congress’s decisions on the Party’s nationalities policy in
the new conditions: to eliminate the actual inequality of peoples which
had been oppressed in tsarist Russia, and draw them into socialist
construction. The Congress condemned the anti-Party deviations on the
nationalities question, great-power chauvinism and local nationalism,
which were a grave danger to communism and proletarian internationalism.

The historic decisions of the Tenth Congress charted
the ways of transition from capitalism to socialism, and methods of
construction of socialism in the new conditions; they stressed the
importance of greater unity between the proletariat and the peasantry, and
stronger Party leadership in the construction of Soviet Russia.